Audio Visual Insights for Web-Conferencing and Live Streaming

This is a really cool time to be part of the video production industry. The immense culture shift toward digital media and smartphone usage is increasing the demand for video by leaps and bounds. After reading the Huffington Post article “Yes, It’s time to get serious about vertical video”, I have to say that the data is compelling. So compelling that it starts to flip everything we about 16:9 video resolutions and makes you think twice about 9:16.

Consider the fact that smartphone users hold their phones vertically 94% of the time and more than half of all video is now consumed on mobile devices. Jill Sherman, SVP, Social Strategy reports that Widescreen (16:9) and square (1:1) will have a hard time competing with vertical video (9:16) when it comes to mobile video consumption.

So I did a test and the results were pretty interesting. Yes, I did see more organic video views a 9:16 vertical video versus a similar 16:9 widescreen video. These test are difficult to draw too much information from because the views depend so much on the content and user behavior but the test did have a striking resemblance to a test performed 1 year earlier on YouTube vs Facebook Video content on Facebook.

I recently got a chance to test out some of the industries top auto tracking camera solutions. Last year at INFOCOMM we saw quite a few new auto-tracking cameras solutions from 1Beyond, HuddleCamHD, Vaddio and PTZOptics. We will get into each of these companies auto-tracking solutions in this blog and I have side by side footage for the HuddleCamHD SimplTrack and PTZOptics Perfect Track.

Auto Tracking Cameras for Lecture Capture

The good news is that that auto-tracking cameras are finally here with some impressive performance. The HuddleCamHD Simpltrack pictured above has some amazing features for controlling the speed and sensistivity we test out in the video below. We also, did a very similar test with the PTZOptics Perfect. I have to say the HuddleCamHD Simpltrack has a much more feature rich interface for auto-tracking. The "Tracking Parameters" turned out to much more in-depth. While, I do love the simplicity of the Perfect Track system from PTZOptics (and the cameras) take a look at the PTZOptics Perfect Track interface below.